WORKING IN TECHNOLOGY TODAY “IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE”
I moved from Manhattan, NY, to Brooksville FL about three and a half years ago and started up my own small computer networking business. This was after going to a good Network Engineering/Data Communications school in Manhattan across from the World Trade Center and graduating a few months before they were hit by terrorists. My major was in Network Engineering and I held a few positions in companies with as many as 5,000 computers on the network in multiple office buildings in the five Boroughs of the city, and I earned up to $26 per hour (with time and a half overtime, of which I got plenty).
Upon moving to Florida I found myself in a time warp. IT spending is in the double digits in the other regions of the country - up to 19% in some places, but the South East suffers and drags its tail along at 4% growth, apparently still locked in a struggle to resist change, stay separate and deny influence from the rest of the United States. My first job here in Hernando lasted less than two days before I gave the guy the heave ho - the guy wanted to pay me $6.00 an hour and, although he had me working on just four computers at a time (I was used to working on 30 to 60 at a time in NYC) he continually pushed me to “check that one” or “see what the other one is doing” (they were all merrily updating and copying files etc. while I was forced to wait for them to complete each option before moving on to whatever next step was required). To top it off he confided in me that “The secret of my business is that I make all these people think that I’m their best friend - but really I’m not.” Gee - Really?
The worst part of it was dealing with a mentality that knew about networking, but refused to use it. The guy had me using a FLOPPY DISK!!! and a file splitter program to cut larger files down to size so I could manually copy them from one computer to another. He was using DOS commands (and acting like they were hot shit) to perform a lot of his tasks - DOS commands which I already knew and used myself when nothing else better was available. I gave him the heave-ho when he told me not to adjust the monitor refresh rates from 60 hertz (which gives me an all day migraine within about an hour) even after I said I’d put them back to 60 when I was through. To top it off, the moron (capital “M” in moron) volunteered me to do some extra money work at night answering support calls for a dial-up network he had invested in telling the senior partner that I spoke Spanish which he naturally assumed because I’m from NYC. Duh. I speak German… and what made it even more evident that I should get away from this Moron was the fact that he assumed that I had been FIRED from my last job (and so stating) - after I had introduced myself and told him that my last contract had run out and that was why I had come down to Florida to get away from the Rat Race up there. In fact I had built a nice network in one building for two law firms, a title company and one construction firm all occupying the same floor on a building where they had specific separate share access to three servers I installed for them. Did I say “Duh”? Not fired. Job done, contract over - bye, bye - everybody happy. (Last time I checked NY State doesn’t pay unemployment benefits to employees who were fired).
I hear horror stories daily from new clients who tell me about all of the other computer repair businesses they have dealt with in the area. Forget about deleting all their files without backing them up for the customer - even Best Buy and Circuit City are guilty of that… or losing the hard drive and selling it to another person who calls the original owner and says “Are you Mrs. So and So? I am looking at a picture of your daughter right now on my new computer” (see article at: http://www.sptimes.com/2007/11/02/Business/It_s_Wild_West_in_PC_.shtml)
I hear sordid stories about my competition - One stole an expensive video card that a user installed himself and replaced it with a cheap one. Another deleted two years of music scores written by a composer. A third actually had the balls to steal an expensive case and replace it with a cheap one, claiming that they lost the original one. Some re-install the same copy of XP onto computer after computer and still charge the customer the full retail price of the operating system. Yet another (when I brought a client in to pick up a new power supply) winked at me (a fellow rip-off artist he must have thought) and tried to sell my client a new motherboard and CPU - without telling him that putting his old XP Hard drive into that system would (at the very least) require him to purchase a new license from Microsoft at full retail cost. Most all of them in the area take a computer after re-installing Windows and give it back to the customer without ever putting service pack 2 on it, or any other security updates and patches of any kind. They charge enough money to do these things, but don’t do the work. By the time I get called in I’m dealing with computers that have up to 5,000 spyware, malware and ad-ware infections, and often viruses… and still no updates of any kind - and XP without service pack two doesn’t have a firewall.
They say “Buyer Beware” and “An educated consumer is your best customer” but I’m dealing with a whole huge bunch of people as clients who cannot separate “Computer Repair” from “Network Engineering” in their minds even when I explain what the difference is. I get calls from offices that need server maintenance - (This is 2007) - and they show me a Windows NT 4.0 Workstation or worse yet, a Windows 98 first edition workstation - and say these are servers. When I finally do run into a genuine NT 4.0 server, nobody logs in to the domain - none of the workstations have ever been made members of the domain, and nobody knows the password to the Administrative account.
Wait - it gets better! One multi-million dollar annual business occupying five buildings has a POS system running DOS on every workstation, using antiquated 16 bit programs, Bigfoot hard drives ready to die, and a fifteen year old Novell server.
Needless to say a very NASTY awakening is in store for these types of businesses within the next two years when they lose their data and systems and there is nothing in place to be able to read any of their backup data-files. In short, they will probably be out of business - or be faced with a very expensive re-networking bill by the people who come in and can hold their business hostage while they try to do the conversions and who will be in the powerful position of demanding any sum they want. That’s probably where the 4% “growth” in IT comes in.
It would be entirely unfair to my clients not to say that SOME of them are of quite normal intelligence (85 to 115 IQ range). I am also not referring to the retired folks who are home computer users. Nice folks who are actually pretty good at using their systems. Some of them are quite capable of grasping technology of all sorts. I am also not referring to ALL of my business clients. Some of them are quite intuitive and manage to muddle through things even though they’re doing it with a “face paint, bear-claw necklace and magic rattles” approach. They do it without having had the benefit of an education as to the technical-level workings of TCP/IP, NTFS etc., but they are curious enough to learn to make things happen on their computers and (with less success) on the network that they need to have work. These two groups I actually appreciate. It’s the third group of “know it all know nothings” that drives me nuts. They know everything but when I go into any explanations to help them accomplish what they want to do they quickly tell me they don’t want me to tell me any of that “technical crap” - “it’s too hard” and they just want to be able to do it. Totally comatose, with a double helping of Duh? Whaaaat??
So I barely cling to life here just below the deep south and wonder whether there is any chance for it to ever catch up to the rest of the world’s developed countries including our own. I wonder whether there is any chance that even modern technology in the hands of people with minds in the early part of the last century, and the century before that one will ever do them any good.
One art league decided this year to “finally” build a web site and “Join the 21st Century” (the quote in the newspapers)… Duh again! Web technology is part of the 20th Century! So, Art League, welcome to the 20th century, not the 21st!
I’m always amazed when knuckle draggers say things like:
“I used to have AOL Internet, but now I have a different Internet”
“I liked the other Internet better”
“I got more RAM because I want my Internet to be faster” (on dial up)
“My computer is running slow” (192 MB RAM, running XP, AOL and Norton Internet Security Suite)
Insisting that “My pictures are in the program” even after I repeatedly explain that they are NOT “in” the program, that the program is an executable, and that programs do not store users pictures in the executable (Using Kodak Easy Share software or some other software that automatically moves pictures from the camera to some other place on their hard drive without revealing the path).
…and after uninstalling Norton Internet Security Suite, (before running the uninstall program from Semantec’s web site because their product sucks and you can’t uninstall it) when Internet Explorer fails to be able to connect to an SSL (HTTPS) web page - the client angrily declares to me “You have ten minutes to fix it!!!” (at which point I really have to walk out. What do they think computer science is - the movie “Hackers” where they hold a gun to the guys head while he has a woman simultaneously going down on him and they tell him he has two minutes to hack into a remote secure server over the internet?). It will take as long as it takes. Good luck signing in to your online banking, asshole. Ten minutes that.
I’m my own boss now - not for $6.00 an hour, sometimes I barely scrape together enough to pay the minimum of my bills - but as one of the most talented and best performing people in the IT departments I worked for in NYC - I’d rather starve than make someone elses business a success who’s currently using floppies and file splitters.
I do make a few bucks here and there, and the companies that have given me contracts are pleased with my work, give me more business, refer me to other clients, and renew their contracts. The rest of my clients living in the time warp should realize that they were stupid in science class all their lives, that they are never going to be able to catch up, and that they should stick to bananas and coconuts and let the experts handle their malfunctioning old plugged in paperweights they fondly display on their desks in order to impress upon infrequent visitors that they too have evolved along with the rest of the human race.
Why “THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE”? Last Christmas when the new X-Box came out and was unavailable anywhere, and people were camping out all over to be first on line to buy one at Circuit City’s and elsewhere, a guy was made front page news in the “Hernando Today” for coming from Tampa to Hernando to camp out at a technology store so he could be first on line to buy his X-Box. He was quoted as saying “I knew I couldn’t get one in Tampa or anywhere else, so I decided to drive out to the middle of nowhere, and here I am”. The middle of nowhere. Time Warp Land. He got THAT right!
On the bright side, I have found over the past few years that web design and search engine optimization are quite challenging and enjoyable. I get to work on creating new things and engineering them to work right from the start. I can’t wait to get to the point where I’m earning enough from SEO / Web design to finally be able to dedicate all of my time to those two endeavors alone.
That’s all for now from the Cave Mann Dave report
